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Lincoln Steffens (1866-1936) was an American journalist and one of the most prominent "muckrakers" of the early 20th Century. As editor of McClure's Magazine in the early 1900s, he exposed political corruption in American government at a state and local level. After his experiences observing the Mexican Revolution and the changes taking place in the early years of the Soviet Union, Steffens became more radical politically, and remained vocal in his support of left-wing movements until the end of his life.

Anna Louise Strong (1885-1970) was an American journalist and political activist throughout her life. For most of the 1910s, she devoted herself to working as a progressive reformer in favor of child welfare. Towards the end of that decade, she began to involve herself in the labor movement in Seattle, and through those experiences became increasingly committed to the cause of international communism. In the 1920s and 1930s, she spent most of her time living in the Soviet Union, working as a journalist and writing books about her experiences for Western audiences that would convince them of the success of communism. While living there, she met with Trotsky (whom she taught to speak English) and Stalin, and created an English-language paper called the Moscow News. After World War II, however, though Strong remained supportive of the Soviet Union, her vocal support of the communist movement in China alienated the government in Moscow, and Strong was only allowed to visit the USSR once in the final two decades of her life. Because of this, she spent her final years living in the People's Republic of China, befriending Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong, and continuing to write books about her experiences that were designed to win more support for communism worldwide.

"Borodin" is almost certainly Mikhail Markovich Borodin (1884-1951), who worked as a Comintern agent from 1919 to 1928. During most of the 1920s, he was an agent in China, advising Sun Yat Sen and helping supply the Kuomintang government with Soviet arms. After Sun Yat Sen's death, Chiang Kai-Shek purged the communists from the Kuomintang, and Borodin returned to the Soviet Union, where he worked for a period of time as an editor for the Moscow News, the English-language paper that Anna Louise Strong had founded. In 1949, he was accused of being an enemy of the Soviet Union, and was sent to a gulag, where he died two years later.